Well, this was a gamble.
Our challenge this month was a roll of the dice — metaphor dice!

Our pal Laura rolled for us — we had several options to choose from — and I went with “my body is a bootleg blessing.” It has a nice alliterative ring to it but … what about the poem? In the end, the pandemic-insurrection-freak storm informed me. When I say I don’t understand anything anymore, I mean it! But even in the face of everything, the body is such a concrete and even weirdly logical thing. At least that’s how I’m feeling about it today…

Bootlegger: A Metaphor Dice Poem
By Liz Garton Scanlon

And I do – swallowing, asking to be touched, inhaling
then exhaling again and again, my body a bootlegged blessing
smuggled over centuries, across oceans and deserts, surviving
ignorance and illness, war and ravishing grief to be alive today,
to do the impossible, to make perfect sense of things.

You can read the others here:
Sara
Laura
Tanita
Tricia
Kelly

And Poetry Friday is at Karen Edmisten’s blog. Enjoy, all. Be safe and well…

Want to try next month’s challenge with us? The prompt: dizzying dizains. (Here’s a little primer for you.) We’ve done dizains once before and apparently liked the process enough to give it another whirl! Join us, and share your poem on March 26 in a post and/or on social media – #PoetryPals.

It’s a new year (pretty grateful about that) and my Poetry Sisters and I have a new plan.
(Lucky for us it includes Zoom-writing together once a month — yay for poetic companionship!)

As usual, we’ve chosen a prompt-per-month. (We’ll try to remember to share them with you in case you want to write along!) For January, we went to Merriam-Webster’s Time Traveler to discover which words were first seen in print the year we were born. Those words were then the fodder for our poems!

I was intrigued by how many of the words for my year were hyphenated or compound so I used LOTS of them. In fact, every word in this poem except the bolded ones were first seen in print in 1967, just like me! It’s very different from the kind of poem I’d usually write but who cares? It was fun.

Born In 1967

The Original
Flower Child
Self Professed
Honey Bell

Born Of
Low Tech
Slow Pitch
Yada Yada

Steps Into
Full Bore
First World
Ego Trip

Makes It Through
Whacked Out
Crack Back
Hissy Fit

PAUSE
Re Format

Still Here
Mono Hull
Micro Quake
She Crab

That’s Me

Now, please go enjoy the others, here:
Tricia
Laura
Tanita
Kelly
Sara
Andi

And go check out Poetry Friday with Jan at Bookseed Studio.

OH!! And if you want to write along with us next month, here’s the plan: Roll a set of metaphor dice and write a poem inspired by your metaphor. If you don’t have the dice, try the online version here. Then, post your poem on Feb 26 (and share on Twitter as #PoetryPals).

Stay safe and well — Liz

It’s the last Friday of the month… and of the year.
It’s Christmas.
Winter solstice has passed but the days are still awfully dark.

Sometime last December, my poetry sisters and I made up our calendar for the year.
It’s hard to even fathom anymore what we expected.
We based quite a few prompts on vision — the clarity 2020 would surely bring.
We looked back in order to course correct or add perspective.
We looked forward (it was a new decade after all!) with… was it eagerness? inspiration?

It makes me feel tender for the 2019 versions of us, and when I say us I mean all of us.

For this final poem, December 2020, we thought we ought to write about wistfulness, which you have to admit is rather on the nose. Also, ironic since for mental health’s sake, many of us have tried not to dwell on the peace and reconciliation that hasn’t been struck, the human touch that hasn’t happened, the health that hasn’t been secured. And yet, here we are at the very end of a very dark, nearly impossible year, wistful.

What did we know, when we gave ourselves that prompt?

Maybe it’s that no matter the year, the pandemic, the election, the gaping societal chasms, it is hard not to ache a little as a year turns. To wish we’d been able to see or accomplish or understand a little more. To fix, finally, what ails us individually, familially, as a people. It is hard not to want to wrest a few months or minutes of the goodness back, too. To wish we didn’t have to let go of what we’ve loved. Maybe that’s always true and this year just throws it into stark relief.

From that place in me to that place in everyone, I send out empathy and love. And this tanka, about the other night’s planetary conjunction, when Saturn and Jupiter came closer to each other than they have been in nearly 400 years.

Wistful
On such a long night
all the people crane their necks
looking for the light,
a planetary promise
that we’re closer than we think

My pal’s poems are here:
Tanita
Sara
Kelly
Laura
Tricia

And Poetry Friday is at Live Your Poem.

Happy New Year, all. Stay safe and well.

The challenge: Hindsight, looking back at an earlier poem with, um, 2020 vision
The focal point: Terza rimas about gratitude from, yes, 2016

Whew. OK. I figured it might be time for a terza rima on gratitude, reprised.
Here goes…

Thanksgiving, 2020

Each stone we add, a sign of stable trust.
We’ll find our way to thankfulness – we must.

Visit my pals at:
Sara
Tanita
Laura
Tricia
Kelly
Andi

And Poetry Friday’s at Carol’s Corner.

Be safe and well, everyone.

The Naani is a poetic form from India consisting of 4 short lines — no more than 20 to 25 syllables total — and very few other rules. (Which always sounds freeing, but isn’t.) We added a twist, because we’re fun that way, focusing on foresight, or fall, or both.

Foresight. These days. Ha! My response was to look to the natural world because nothing about the human world seems predictable at all anymore. There are messages for us in eggs and trees and maps, though, and we can read those…

An egg uncracked,
a mystery unsolved,
what waits for us tomorrow –
one sun or two?

Inside the tree
sits a clock, ticking off days,
seasons, shades of yellow,
predicting what comes next.

Topographic lines
read like fingerprints:
Go this way. This will be steep.
This will be beautiful.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Enjoy these other poems, friends, and stay safe and well…

Laura
Sara
Tanita
Tricia
Kelly
Andi

Poetry Friday is at Teacher Dance this week!

OH! And would you like to join us next month? Our theme is hindsight and the goal is to pick one of your old poems to revise and/or write a new poem in conversation with it… Try it!

My poetry pals and I try to plan our prompts at the beginning of the year so when the end of each month rolls around, the inspiration is just sitting there waiting for us. Sometimes it’s a surprise — as if a rascally little muse-elf slipped into our Google doc in the dead of night just to mess with us. But in a good way. Not the way 2020 is messing with us. You know what I mean.

Anyway, that’s how it was for me when I looked at this month’s assignment:
Ponderous, or based on an image of a hippo; written in any form.

Um, what????
But ok, rascally little muse-elf. Here goes….

Stones in the River
Liz Garton Scanlon